PAIR OF NOVELS SHOW POWER OF IMAGINATION

One of the dictums impressed upon aspiring authors is that they should write about what they know. A corollary of this excellent advice is that it is extremely difficult to write about what you don't know, or to write about it well, at least. This refers not merely to what you have learned, but more so what you know intimately. Just because you have vacationed in Jamaica and own all of Bob Marley's records, for instance, does not mean that you have the wherewithal to write a convincing Rastafarian novel.

With these difficulties in mind, it becomes all the more impressive when an author displays the extraordinary literary skill and, rarer and more important, the empathic imagination, to write about a people and culture that is not native to him. The risk is enormous, for failure could bring charges of racism or xenophobia.

But it can be done, as is amply demonstrated by two new novels from Europe. Ratking (Bantam, $15.95), is a police procedural with psychological pretensions set in Italy but written by an Englishman. The Rules of the Game (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $18.95) is a psychological novel of midlife angst and loss of innocence in suburban Connecticut, but its author is best known as a distinguished writer of French detective stories.

The four years British native Michael Dibdin spent in Perugia, Italy, where he taught English at a university, no doubt gave him more than a passing familiarity with the details of Italian life and geography, and a confident understanding of the Italian temperament. It is not surprising, therefore, that his second work of fiction, Ratking, is set primarily in Perugia. What is surprising is his breathtaking audacity in making only two of his large cast of principal characters natives of English-speaking countries -- one South African and one American.

SOMETHING ROTTEN IN PERUGIA

The rest are Italian, and not generic Italian. There are Venetians, Romans, Sicilians, Tuscans, Umbrians and Calabrians. Dibdin endows each character not only with distinguishing individual personalities, but also with authentic regional traits. It is a dazzling feat that conveys the variety and complexity of Italian life. Dibdin also fills the book with telling details, such as the lazy bureaucracy his hero, Inspector Aurelio Zen, encounters in a simple trip to the local public library.

Ratking is not entirely successful, however. The first half is needlessly off-putting and unfriendly to all but the most motivated readers. The hero is passive, even stupid. Many sections begin with overly literary descriptions that frustrate the reader by offering no reference points to identify where we are, what we are looking at. The plot is static and contrived and lacks suspense, with Zen getting his most important information not through clever police work but via coincidence.

Such tactics, apparently meant to cut against the expectations engendered by formulaic thrillers, can be pulled off only if the literary style is sufficiently engaging of itself to keep the reader going, or if the web of venality contains some humor.

The problematic features of Ratking combine with the author's skill and vision to make it more admirable than enjoyable. Nonetheless, this is a writer to watch. Dibdin needs only to learn that it is not necessary to sacrifice entertainment to write a book of literary merit.

THE RULES OF THE GAME

Georges Simenon is a grand old master of the kind of writing Dibdin aspires to. The prolific French author -- he has written hundreds of novels, many yet to be translated -- is best known for his realistic police procedurals featuring Maigret, an inspector in Paris. Less popular but perhaps more significant are his psychological novels, stories of almost pure character development.

The Rules of the Game was first published in 1955 in France but is appearing in the United States for the first time. Its protagonist, Walter J. Higgins, is a middle-aged supermarket manager in Connecticut, a bootstrapper who has risen from the humblest beginnings. When he is turned down for membership into the local country club, Higgins is forced to question everything he believes about who and what he is.

Simenon writes with a deceptive simplicty of style. Reading his prose is a pleasure in itself. Furthermore, somehow he has gained a thorough understanding of everyday, American middle-class life. Higgins mows the yard, goes to work, participates in a school board meeting, worries over his children, and never does it seem that this is the work of a European mind pretending to be American. The author never sneers at the Americans he is writing about. At the end, Higgins' apparent failure to grasp the opportunities afforded by his crisis grows out of his particular character defects, not out of shortcomings endemic to his culture.

In this short book, intensely pleasurable, Simenon tells a story about ordinary Americans, and manages to make us care deeply for them. Very few writers who have written as much as Simenon enjoy such an elevated literary reputation. The Rules of the Game shows he more than deserves it.